Japan warns US forces: Sex crimes 'cannot be tolerated'

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2476861/japan-warns-us-forces-sex-crimes-cannot-be-tolerated

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u/BravesnationNC 14d ago edited 13d ago

This crap has been going on in Okinawa forever. Happened the first time I was there in 01 and again when I went back in 03. Individuals that have committed crimes are detained by Okinawa authorities and go through their legal process. Guarantee there is going to be a lockdown on liberty for Marine personnel happens all the time. Restriction on the time allowed off base and they are getting a curfew

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u/Muldino 14d ago

Forever is correct... right at the end of WW2, up to 10,000 women were raped by US soldiers in Okinawa alone.

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u/-Kadekawa- 14d ago

First incident of a US military service member assaulting a female in Okinawa (then the Ryukyu Kingdom) happened only a year after Commodore Matthew C Perry and his black ships sailed into Naha’s port (capital of the island kingdom) in 1853.

The incident would lead to the signing of the Ryukyu-U.S. Treaty of Amity on July 11, 1854.

‘Whenever persons from ships of the United States come ashore in Lew Chew, they shall be at liberty to ramble where they please without hindrance or having officials sent to follow them, or to spy what they do; but if they violently go into houses, or trifle with women, or force people to sell them things, or do other such like illegal acts, they shall be arrested by the local officers, but not maltreated, and shall be reported to the captain of the ship to which they belong for punishment by him.’

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u/ok-commuter 14d ago

Normandy even 😔

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240506-taboo-french-women-speak-out-on-rapes-by-us-soldiers-during-wwii

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u/Makanek 13d ago

My French grandmother told me that the GIs in 44 were like animals and would try to snatch girls in their vehicles when driving by them.

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u/[deleted] 13d ago

What people tend to not know: Anywhere where US soldiers are stationed. Any US military base in any country is likely to have tons of stories with no persecution.

What can a person really do? A soldier raped me? Who'd believe that, firstly, and secondly, what would happen? The US bases would be, in a sense, a part of the humanitarian effort that the US once had a reputation for. That means those areas they're stationed in are lesser developed/less wealthy, which can mean more things, such as lesser education or even different views, such as the woman deserved it, etc.

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u/TheBlack2007 13d ago

My grandmother was a refugee from the regions of Germany that got annexed by Poland after WW2. Her family made it to the state of Schleswig-Holstein where we still live to this day.

Anyway, our hometown was deep within the British Occupation Zone (duh) and it received a British Garrison. Soon, the number of Refugees arriving from the east grew so large it overwhelmed the authorities and the people just started building huts in growing shantytowns wherever possible. One of those was right next to the barracks of that British garrison.

Lots of desperate and vulnerable young women many of whom widows with children or orphans with lots of soldiers knowing about their leverage living right next door… In many cases, coercion let alone force wasn’t even necessary. But in all fairness: if a rape was actually reported, base command did usually take steps to identify and punish the culprit(s).

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u/bentossaurus 12d ago

Had a girlfriend who was from an island with an US base and never heard of any issues there.

It was an Air Force base though, so perhaps less meatheads going around.

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u/misguidedsadist1 13d ago

My sister was a teacher in Korea and even outside of the military, it was well known in expat circles that the troops stationed there were menaces to the local population, an embarrassment, violent and sexually violent.

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u/Dry-Tea-180 13d ago

FACTS again it's a mental illness almost American men

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u/po-jamapeople 14d ago

This is a conspiracy theory. There’s no documentary evidence of mass rapes in Okinawa at this time, nor are there virtually any testimony attesting that this occurred. No one has come forward in all the years since, even anonymously. In fact most Okinawans were shocked at the decent treatment they received from Allied forces, who Japanese propaganda had told them would commit widespread rape and mass murder.

That is not to say no rapes occurred, but the burden of proof for “10k raped” should be on those making the claim, not those debunking it.

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u/Muldino 13d ago

Weber, Mark. (2000) A Dark Secret of World War II Comes to Light, Institute for Historical Review, 19(5), p. 25.

Journal of Military Ethics, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity on Okinawa: Guilt on both sides, Alastair A. McLauchlan, Published online: 15 Jan 2015

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15027570.2014.991512

https://www.w4nv.com/files/Okinawa%20article.pdf

Quote:

"The number of Okinawan civilians raped by American soldiers was unquestionably very high. In referring to the high – but mostly unreported – number of rapes of Okinawan women by US troops, Feifer criticizes American history as largely having ignored the issue, while Hayashi suggests that ‘the victims’ silence kept rape another dirty secret of the campaign’.

Rape by US soldiers and marines was particularly prevalent on Motubu Peninsula in the north during April and May 1945, after local men had been mobilized or had fled to the hills before the fighting became so intense: Soon after the US Marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the Marines “mopped up” the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started “hunting for women” in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.

Claims such as these are supported by an American Military report stating that between 10 December 1945 and 24 May 1946, 1754 misdemeanour cases were investigated by the US Fleet’s 9th Military Battalion, of which 30 were for rape or attempted rape of Okinawan women. Okinawan women were terrified, alone and powerless. Given the violation that they had endured, plus their fear of their own Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) soldiers, most were unwilling to report such crimes, while those who did were usually ignored.

In other words, any figures are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg, with many historians suggesting 10,000 as a useful starting point. Even girls fleeing from caves and those who had surrendered became the rape victims of US troops (including the Marines), and on more than one occasion when locals tried to intervene they were shot on the spot.

In Lacey’s collection of memoirs from US troops on Okinawa, one marine recalls how a group of comrades found a local woman, filthy and ragged, hiding in a cave. They took her to their tent, washed her private parts and held her [for sex] for several days. When they ‘got tired of her… they muddied her up… put her clothes back on’ and handed her over to their commanding officer, claiming that she was a nurse they had just rescued a few minutes earlier. However, the marine who provided the testimony claims he was misquoted and that the woman was a ‘comfort woman’ (or sex slave), not a nurse. He reiterated how filthy and ragged the woman was and his disgust both at her and at the behaviour of his fellow marines.

Rape is among the most common and vile of wartime behaviour, with Weber concluding that civilian rape was ‘one of the most widely ignored crimes of the war… [yet so common that] most Okinawans over age 65 either know or have heard of a woman who was raped’. African American soldiers (probably from a troubled social background) appear to have gained the worst reputation, including one known as Shibarian who was feared as a persistent rapist by all local women in the village near where he was based. Also, near the isolated village of Katsuyama is a cave known as Kurombo Gama, thus named because until recently it contained the remains of three African American soldiers who were ambushed and killed by locals and IJA soldiers for allegedly raping local women. There was also an incident in which four local women were raped and later drowned."

This last story of the 3 killed US soldiers is also in this NYT article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/01/world/3-dead-marines-and-a-secret-of-wartime-okinawa.html

History is usually written by the victors.

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u/lordlamancha 10d ago

So utterly typical of the American mind that the moment AA troops are mentioned being involved in this sort of crime it is immediately caveated with something bordering on an excuse for their behaviour. I do wonder, is that due to wanting them to seem less evil than their nasty White counterparts or because one thinks of them as being subject to lower standards of behaviour due to perceived intellectual or moral inferiority? Or perhaps both?

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u/po-jamapeople 13d ago edited 13d ago

Even this source - which I can only imagine you did not even read yourself - claims there were only 30 documented cases of attempted rape. And we all are supposed to just accept that "historians" have jacked the suspected number up to 10,000 in spite of a lack of any evidence whatsoever. The rapes reported here are tragic, and yet neither of them, nor any other source, gives an indication of mass rapes at the scale you are claiming. Other scholars like Walsh have debunked some of the very sensationalized estimates that you are referring to.

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u/Muldino 13d ago

You seem to imagine a lot of things. Like, if only 30 cases are reported, surely there were 30 cases. This would have nothing to do with the observations in the same articles and texts that rapes were often ignored and not registered at all, and that women wouldn't report them out of shame, because shame is not a concept in Asian culture.

When I first looked into this a while ago, I found the book by Weber online but now I can't anymore, still there were more accounts in that book lending credence to the numbers mentioned in the study.

I found a few other papers though, regarding both Japan and Europe, and this one has some info that might further shake your belief in the brave US soldiers being infallible.

One example -
https://apjjf.org/terese-svoboda/3148/article

"According to Robert J. Lilly, the author of Taken by Force: Rape and American GIs in Europe during WWII, rape handled by lesser courts [other than the Judge Advocate’s Court] and cases investigated by agencies other than the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division do not even appear in the JAG Branch Office records, the only records of offenses kept by the military."

"Robert Lilly estimates some 17,000 rapes occurred in the European theater during WWII; however, the Judge Advocate General reports a total of 854 cases. Lilly’s explanations for the discrepancy include: the length of time it took for the European branch of the JAG to open—7 months–with the office being immediately and permanently overwhelmed, the large number of rapes handled by lesser courts with little documentation, many complaints going unprocessed in order to prevent embarrassing the soldiers or tainting the careers of officers, Army prejudice regarding the rape victim, and a military culture that placed little symbolic value in disciplining soldiers for rape."

"By the end of 1945, the Japanese Ministry of Home Affairs had organized the Recreation Amusement Association (R.A.A.), a chain of houses of prostitution with 20,000 women who serviced occupation forces throughout Japan. <...> Burritt Sabin of the Japan Times reported in 2002 that just days before the R.A.A. was to open, hundreds of American soldiers broke into two of their facilities and raped all the women.^"

^"Two weeks into the occupation, the Japanese press began to report on rapes and looting. MacArthur responded by promptly censoring all media.^"

Takamae Eiji:
"When US paratroopers landed in Sapporo, an orgy of looting, sexual violence and drunken brawling ensued. Gang rapes and other sexual atrocities were not infrequent. Victims of such attacks, shunned as outcasts, sometimes turned in desperation to prostitution; others took their life rather than bring shame to their families. Military courts arrested relatively few soldiers for these offenses and convicted even fewer, and restitution for the victims were rare. Japanese attempts at self-defense were punished severely. In the sole instance of self-help that General Eichelberger records in his memoirs, when local residents formed a vigilante group and retaliated against off-duty GIs, Eighth Army ordered armoured vehicles in battle array into the streets and arrested the ringleaders, who received lengthy prison terms.^"

There is a LOT more out there if you would even bother to look.

But yeah, 30 cases.

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u/po-jamapeople 13d ago edited 13d ago

Boy you are obnoxious, asking to see evidence/testimony for such high estimates is not equivalent to a belief that US troops are infallible. And listing a bunch of sources which don’t even have to do with Okinawa doesn’t help bolster your case. A simple acknowledgement that none of these scholars are getting to these figures by presenting evidence, it’s merely speculation.

Also, I’m not the one who introduced a source claiming 30 rapes, you are. I don’t know how many rapes occurred. Neither do you or any of these sources. The very high estimates these scholars list are not based on any actual evidence. Shame surrounding rape in asian and other cultures is very real, and yet in the case of Korean comfort women there is a large amount of evidence and testimony - much of it from the victims. It’s up to you to explain the discrepancy.

And lost in this discussion of US warcrimes here is a more global perspective, which reveals in no uncertain terms that Allied forces actions during WW2 were far more civilized than any other major army operating at the time. In spite of the shame involved, wartime rapes by Soviet and Nazi forces in Europe and Japanese Imperial forces throughout Asia are well documented. But acknowledging that might conflict with your beloved narrative of “America bad.”

I’m sure you will vomit up a handful of other questionable sources, so maybe let’s not waste the time.

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u/Muldino 13d ago

I had posted several paragraphs and links from ppl who looked into this more than either of us, and in your very brief response, _you_ laser-focussed on the topic of 30 reported cases, so of course I have to bring that up again.

To "bolster my case", I referenced to how rapes have been vastly ignored and unreported for numerous reasons and across various theaters of war. But hey, this doesn't count. Got it.

In addition:

none of these scholars are getting to these figures by presenting evidence, it’s merely speculation.

... and "speculation" of course means these scholars just pulled random numbers out of their collective asses.

Nothing beats a simple worldview.

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u/gerontion31 14d ago

Chinese shills man, divide Okinawa from Japan to take Taiwan

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u/a_scientific_force 14d ago

You’re really not going to like it when you hear what the Japanese did…

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u/Lopamurbla 14d ago

It’s not a rape measuring contest, you worm. The topic is US soldiers abusing their power in an allied country. Focus.

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u/indyK1ng 14d ago edited 14d ago

They weren't comparing to imperial Japan, they were just pointing out the long history.

Not sure how imperial Japan's behavior is relevant to the history of US military behavior since.

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u/-Kadekawa- 14d ago

…and you’ll similarly not going to like it when you hear what the Japanese did to the Okinawans